Uncatchable
This week I spent some time doing what trout fishers
like me do when the days begin to warm but it is still two months until trout
season opens. I spent a pleasant
afternoon thinking about wild waters full of wild trout. My memory could have gone to many different
places and moments since I have been chasing trout for over fifty years
now. It settled not on a safely-netted
trophy, but on likely the biggest brown trout I never caught.
I recalled that fateful late September day when, as I
rounded a bend in a favorite stream, I saw that a large dead elm had fallen
across the water. I have caught large
trout in this river before. In fact, just
the year before this trip I had landed a 20.5-inch brown trout which to date is
the largest trout I have ever caught. I figured
that something large would be lurking in the deep water around that fallen
tree. The banks were very steep and I
suspected that the water ahead was too deep for wading, so I climbed the ten
feet up to the top of the bank intending to walk around the deadfall and fish
it from the upstream side. I didn’t want
to spook any fish, so I stayed away from the edge of the bank for the most
part. Curiosity though, overpowered me
and I took just one peek over the blooming goldenrods.
There, just downstream from the main trunk of the dead
elm, and right in between the “V” formed by the two large branches jutting off
from the main trunk at forty-five-degree angles, a huge brown trout was finning
lazily in the slowed current. I guessed
the bruiser at about 25-26 inches. I
looked up ahead and noticed that about 75 yards upstream the water was a
gurgling over a gravel bar. Simple. I would stay out of sight on top of the bank
until that point, then I would cross the stream at that gravel bar where the
water would be shallow, and carefully creep back down the opposite bank where
there was a flat spot to stand on within easy casting distance of that big
trout. He was as good as mine.
Well, the plan worked perfectly until I got to that casting
spot. It seemed like I could cast just a
few feet short of the submerged tree trunk and then feed out line to allow my
nymph to sink and then drift under the tree and into the feeding zone of that
big brown. I sent out my first cast, saw
the fly sink as planned, but then I saw the line swirl instead of feed out
downstream. Each and every cast, as I
tried to drift my nymph into that hole and in front of that monster fish I
found that the way the deadfall and the current interacted it caused a slow
swirling eddy just ahead of the main tree trunk that carried my fly away from
the trout and into the silty fishless shallows.
I spent thirty minutes and tried every cast and trick I knew but I could
not get the fly to drift anywhere near that fish. Finally, I left him there, still finning
lazily, blissfully unaware of my presence.
The next day I fished the same stretch of stream, and
once again climbed the steep bank ahead of the deadfall elm. I crept up to the edge and peered over. Sure enough, the big brown was there. This time though I watched him for a while
and then continued upstream, crossed at the gravel bar and kept right on
going. I knew that fish was uncatchable. There was no sense in putting my nerves
through that again!
The following year I found that someone had taken a chainsaw to the fallen elm and removed it altogether. I'm pretty sure that whoever did it was protecting the environment for trout as that hole around the big elm would have eventually silted in. Still, a part of me wonders if the landowner hadn't gotten completely frustrated trying to catch that big trout.
You too, can be uncatchable. Lazily finning in the current of this world. But our God is not like that big trout. He is not uncatchable. In fact, all you need to do is to desire to
find him and he will come searching you out.
"Ask
His Peace <><
Deacon Dan
Photo by Zach Reiner on Unsplash
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